My brother happened to mention this German webpage some time ago, at the moment I’m really happy he did! The site has quite a good selection of languages. I have also found there very accurate information e.g. the platforms for the train s I searched – and this information wasn’t always that easy to find at the station itself!

However, someone I talked to about this site had found one minor problem with the search: Greek cities are written in Greek alphabet*, so in order to find connections to Athens you should type Αθήνα (I tested copy&paste just for fun but it didn’t work). Search for cities written originally in Cyrillic alphabet seems to work better, you can find the cities in their Latin alphabet form. ( I found Kiev and Kyiv (in Ukrainian Київ) as well as Belgrad (in Serbian Beograd/Београд**).

During the last months I’ve been very grateful to Deutsche Bahn! But I couldn’t help thinking WHY are they maintaining such a service? After all, it takes resources and it seems like no other country or organisation is offering anything like that (if you want info on international trains the Finnish State Railways’s webpage links you to the two All-European websites I put above).

German efficacy! (Good national PR this website, don’t you think?)

“We used to be THE European superpower and we are still big, all the European trains pass by us or if not then we are at least AWARE of their timetables!” (They are actually big and the trains do pass by them.)

There are 82 million Germans, so there are probably quite a couple of million of them travelling in European railways yearly – and I’d think they are assuming they get information&service from their state railway officials.

If somebody has more views on the topic I’d be interested to hear about them!

Enjoy your train travels in Europe!

*he suggested that the timetable data is uploaded straight from the national railways site of each country

**I just found out that Serbian is apparently the only European language using both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets.